Vert P. Pravoslavie, inoslavie, inoverie: ocherki po istorii religioznogo raznoobraziya Rossiiskoi imperii [Orthodoxy, Non-Orthodox, and Other Faiths: Essays on the history of religious diversity in the Russian Empire]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012, 275 p.

Here is a sample of filigree historiography, a text written according to the highest standards of historical science. I am ready to put this fact in the first place, even regardless of the importance and complexity of the topic itself. A good, professional translation helps to feel the special beauty of the restrained, ascetic language of historical reasoning, built on a series of strictly documented evidence and allowing itself the rare liberty of careful guesses, comparisons and interpretations in cases where the evidence does not give a clear picture. This style and language, the very technique of working with sources, the very architecture of the explanatory structure built up in the course of research - all this I would recommend as an example to follow for students, and for everyone else who is related to history as a discipline, and to scientific discipline as such.

The book is the first to bring together seven "essays" that were previously published separately as articles (six of them are in English, so this is their first Russian translation). Paul Werth is one of the recognized experts on the history of religion in imperial Russia, a researcher of the diverse influence of religion on society and the state of the St. Petersburg period. His works do not belong to "religious studies" as such: he is not interested in religions phenomenologically, not in themselves as a set of doctrines, discourses, rituals, institutions and norms; but at the same time, all of these - both discourses, norms and institutions - are present in his works, refracted" functionally", as elements that can be used as a whole. embedded in the political and social life of the empire. The author looks at each religious tradition as if a little detached, not trying to get into its "innermost depth", because his work is based on the following principles:

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the task is quite different; he uses the concepts of "religion", "religion", and "denomination" as general categories suitable for both imperial officials and modern historians. Paul Werth is not a historian of Orthodoxy, Islam, or Catholicism, but confessional categories and identities are constantly present in the social constructs and political dynamics that he studies.

The author's goal is to show all the confessional diversity and complex forms of "coupling" of religion and society, which changed during the imperial period. With this goal in mind, Werth undertakes, with unwavering skill, a study of different faiths and different aspects of the topic. Here is a brief list of the topics of the seven essays: Christianization of the Mari pagans (based on materials from the mid-19th century); regulation of the "change of faith" procedure and confessional identification after the proclamation of freedom of conscience in 1905; the problem of autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church; the formation of the Kryashen community (Tatar Christians); the confessional nature of civil registration; regulation of mixed religious organizations. the special position of the Armenian Church at the intersection of internal and external interests of the Empire. It is interesting how, working with various materials related to these subjects, the author nevertheless creates a single picture; for him, these seven essays are seven attempts to approach, from different angles, one goal, namely, to understand the place of religion in Russian society, the significance of the process of regulating religious diversity for Russia. life of the Russian Empire.

The author's conclusion, which he expresses in various essays and based on various testimonies, is as follows: religion was considered in Russia, up to 1917, as the main marker of identity. "Until its fall in 1917, the regime stubbornly supported not only the superiority of Orthodoxy over so-called foreign confessions, and Christianity over non-Believers, but also faith over irreligion and 'nihilism '" (p. 43). (The second, parallel system of identification was, of course, the class system). Werth subtly shows how religion permeates the entire social organism: for example, even the confessional nature of metric books testified that "the Russian state was based not only ideologically, but also institutionally on confessional foundations" (p.126). Another example is the inability to go-

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the state's inability to fully overcome the problem of "mixed marriages" - the inability, the origins of which are already laid in the very concept of "mixed marriages"; the state's unwillingness in principle to abstract from the religious meaning of the institution of marriage as such; therefore, the attitude towards" mixed marriage " ranged from hopes for the spread of Orthodoxy, for the integration of "non-Orthodox" territories, to fears reverse influence on the Orthodox and "falling away" - the main threat to the Orthodox Empire (p. 168). Another example is the Georgian one: it is the church's canonical arguments that, oddly enough, dominate the controversy surrounding Georgian autocephaly, which was abolished in 1811, and thematize the increasingly acute "national question" (p. 92).

This situation, where religious identity and confessional divisions play a crucial role in the social structure, gradually and steadily changed, at first very slowly, and then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, with increasing speed; and it changed in two directions-first, towards the increasingly determining significance of ethnicity, and secondly,towards the growing importance of ethnic identity. in the direction of attempts to form a single citizenship.

On the one hand, ethnic identity became more and more central, politically significant, and socially tangible, and this process ended already in Soviet Russia with the transition in the classification of the population from the religious principle to the ethnic one (not to mention the main one, "class"): the author summarizes this process of ethnization at the beginning of the XX century on pp. 62-64 in some of the cases discussed in the book - as in the case of the Georgian autocephaly, or in the course of the Christianization of the Mari or Tatars (Kryashen), and in many others-the national logic collided with the confessional one, questioned it, and declared itself increasingly as the decisive energy of the unfolding "era of nationalism". The author goes on to write: "The Soviet classification system, of course, rejected religion as a basis for identifying an individual in favor of nationality. In this respect, Soviet practice served to legitimize an important shift that began in the last years of the empire and represented a decisive break with the previous ways of conceptualizing imperial diversity " (p. 64). In the end, it was national interests that blew up the empire in 1917 - and, by the way, it will happen again more than seventy years later, with another collapse of the empire in the early 1990s.

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On the other hand, both the imperial governments and the general "public" felt, although for different reasons, the need to create a single, universal citizenship of the modern type, a single nation instead of the complex imperial mosaic, but this latter process never reached its end and was suspended by the Revolution. "In fact, the author continues, Russia has not developed a civil system in which the entire population of the country would be united by the same rights and obligations, and confessions were one of the main factors in dividing society into separate components" (p. 44)- For example, one of the foundations of a new universalism could be the introduction of civil marriage; however, According to the author, this "would mean too radical a break with the past for a regime that remained committed to religion in general almost to the same extent as to Orthodoxy in particular" (p.175). It is interesting that due to the important role of confessional arrangements, the movement towards universal citizenship was largely conceived in terms of gaining "freedom of conscience", and Werth shows how already the Minister of the Interior in 1861-1868, Count Peter Valuev, justified the cautious easing of the Ostsee Lutheran Germans with references to "the inalienable rights of humanity" and " freedom religions" as an ideal project (p. 154). However, even the declaration of these rights in 1905 did not lead in practice to full religious freedom, just as society as a whole did not acquire universal citizenship.

Perhaps such a transition simply could not have occurred due to the presence of a heavy, difficult to unify, multi-stage imperial structure with its historically accumulated complexity. Another of the advantages of the work is the skill with which Werth weaves confessional subjects into the problems of "imperialism", into the themes of imperial unity and the corresponding logic. This particular logic constantly came into conflict with the logic of confessional regulation, despite the fact that this latter, as we have seen, was one of the foundations of the imperial system. Imperial logic - the logic of imperial unity and imperial interest-was based on a hierarchy of confessions, but it also required constant exceptions to the unified scheme. Exceptions, as the author points out in the chapter on the same mixed marriages (see pages 149 and 157), were the most important principle of state power, and, indeed, the Russian imperial system

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it left ample legal and political space for exceptions. Imperial logic required the constant adaptation of any rules - including the general code of laws - to the infinite mosaic of imperial reality. In the end, the empire was also no stranger to universalism - but by no means a rational universalism of the modern type, based on strict adherence to unified legislation.

The universalism of empire is more pragmatic than normative. Werth writes that " the universalist tendency...it significantly outweighed the particularist one, and was also much more compatible with the imperial character of the Russian state" (p. 68). However, he shows by many examples that this universalism meant different things in different contexts - from concessions to ethnic identity in the Orthodox mission in the Volga region to the refusal of autocephaly to the Georgian Church. In the case of the Armenian Apostolic Church, to which a separate chapter is devoted, imperial logic balanced between the desire for integration (and hence subordination to the Christian, but not the Orthodox Church) and the use of the Armenian Catholicosate in foreign policy in the Middle East (due to its significant influence on the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire).

The fact that several brilliant articles by Paul Werth were published in Russian under the same cover can be considered great news for both historians of religion and historians of the Russian Empire. Although all these texts have already been published before, they look great together and even begin to "play" in a new way, matching each other and complementing each other. The result is a complex and reliable picture that is as well documented as it is expertly integrated into the body of related research.

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